Long time ago, I once did a psych rotation at Terrell State Hospital in Texas. The big question posed for us students by our teachers, was whether or not it was right for administration to be using a cattle prod on a patient that was gutteral, scatalogical, and aggressive? I was the lonesome minority of one amongst the teachers and students that said that it was absolutely disgraceful to be doing this.

The big argument for using it at Terrell, was that this was supposedly more humane than allowing the patient to wallow in his own shit. My the great claims for electricity through the years! Always in vogue. But in my youthful innocence, I thought then, that it was just the particular regional backwardness of where I was at (Texas), and that this debate was a vestigal remains of a former primitive psychiatry along with the use of ‘insulin therapy’ and ‘hydrotherapy’. Alas, but one can see today that ‘hydrotherapy’ is now back in vogue with the likes of Dick Cheney, Ricardo Sanchez, Alberto Gonzalez, and Donald Rumsfield runnning the wards. And so is the cattle prod. They now call it The Taser, and it has become the fascistmindeds’ favorite tool of torture, both at home and abroad.

An Alternet article looks at The killers’ alternative to guns